they died telling their doctors their bodies were to be used for research. the doctors took what's left of their patients and injected them with plastic, rubber, resin and wax. their soul's left their faces, light snuffed from their eyes, sound robbed from their gaping mouths. they died finally escaping pain and the infirm's ridicule. they died nameless and historyless, their skin color betraying some hint of who they must have been.

the germany exhibit might have told us who they were while living, but the chicago exhibit took pains to divert us to how this human piece of flesh functions rather than highlight what else could horribly happen to it. perhaps this exhibit's most extreme example of macabre entertainment is a skeleton bent ninety degrees to its side, it looked as though the man did everything sideways and addressed everyone from the side of his body.

that their names and lives remained unknown never detracted from that these statues were once human. they are splayed, flayed, dissected, picked apart, pickled, stretched, sliced and chopped, but in poses of cycling, atop a horse rearing, in the moment of catching a soccer ball, in the mid-leap of dancing. when bodies die they take on the shape of remembrance, that the person becomes a token of the life you lived with them; they turn into ornaments and remembrances to treasure. there is a lesson in letting go when you release someone when they die, when they come back stiff and made up and preserved in boxes.

my mother and sister are nurses, and i understand how the poor souls died and were turned into exhibit experiments; reminders for everyone to care for the time they have left. but i look at the female archer, whose taut musles were poised to show tension, her intent face fixed in concentration, her legs relaxed in a kneel. her right hand had just released an arrow into infinity. what a way to remind us of eternity.